Thursday evening, about sunset, while I was walking home when I realized my face was hurting. It was a dull pain but when it finally caught my attention, it was sharp enough to be quite annoying . My first thought was, “Perhaps I had been stung by a bee” a second later, “Maybe I was coming down with some disease.” I had Bell’s Palsy several years ago and maybe there was an unnoticed infection and it was coming back. The pain was about PAINS~5 on the Probaway – Pain Scale, Uncomfortable, but I can ignore it when I need to do important things.

Things couldn’t have been much better! There was a beautiful sunset, the air was pleasantly filled with an autumn chill, a few people were calmly hurrying along their chosen ways to wherever it is they were going and I was feeling healthy and happy. But, my face hurt and it was beginning to concern me. Why, was my face hurting so much. Could it be, because I had been smiling so much, that just being relaxed wasn’t enough? Then I suddenly realized my happiness was the source of my face pain. It hurt because I had been smiling for a long time while I walked along. So I intentionally relaxed my face and stopped smiling. It worked and it became apparent that the sole reason for my facial discomfort was my chuckling over the day’s events and the facial expressions that accompanied those thoughts. That was the sole cause of my pain. Now that’s a weird realization and experience!

My blogs are often filled with gloom and doom but for me it isn’t an emotional problem and there is no associated personal depression, only a little world-sorrow, what the Germans call Weltschmerz. I am actually quite happy most of the time and feel emotionally fulfilled working on my personal choice of problems. Those happen to be trying to find a way to maximize total human happiness in the long run and it’s a thankless pursuit at least in the short run. However, it gives me an important goal to strive for and the path towards that goal is filled with a multitude of curious turns and peculiar problems.

The outlook for humanity and the Earth in general a hundred years in the future is very gloomy but the prediction for one year or the thousand years is much better. The society of humans is very vigorous and successful at the moment and will continue to be so for a few more years, until overpopulation and over-consumption over-stress the Earth and precipitate a disaster. Then the Doomsday war will smack us really hard knocking the population way down perhaps below Medieval levels. If at that time humanity could learn two simple things the outlook for the next thousand years into the future is quite good again. The two things needed for a stable high-tech civilization is an agreed upon population of about 100 million people and a total control and elimination of Weapons of Extermination. With a population of that size the Earth could supply everyone’s needs and most of their pleasures and there would be much less need for human conflict. It would be Heaven on Earth. Modern man now has the knowledge necessary to exterminate human life, or soon will have, but for humans to survive that knowledge itself must be destroyed.

That sublime future world might seem boring to modern people because so much of what we now do is based on conflict. However, seeing how popular competitive sports have become on HDTV perhaps that, apparently innate, need could be fulfilled with sports. Human society might devolve into more of a small community of specific interests type of life style. It would be up to those people what they wanted to do but it would seem reasonable that if the two basic conditions mentioned above were met that most people could also be happy.

Living people, even the few very lucky very young ones who survive, will probably never see this future sublime society but after the agonies of the Doomsday and the revivification afterwards created from the EarthArks there is hope. People will realize that there must not be a second Doomsday and the way to accomplish that is to have a population that can easily be sustained. Humans have no natural predators except other humans so there will be repeated population booms and busts until a fixed population size is agreed upon and enforced. It would be best for these living people to be selected for maximizing genetic healthiness. Nature has always done this in the past but because humans have now become so very successful that process must be controlled by humans.

To reach the sublime society we need to seek to survive and to be healthy, happy, wise and wealthy.